Dennis Mortensen on Analytics and Click Fraud

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dennis Mortensen of IndexTools. IndexTools is an analytics vendor based in Hungary. We are currently evaluating their tool as part of a study we are doing comparing 6 different analytics packages.

Dennis has been heavily involved in the analytics business since 1996. Back then the model was one of manually analyzing log file data and manually reporting findings to clients. It’s a funny thing, really. Given how far the analytics business has come, not much has really changed.

For those companies that are using analytics as a business intelligence tool to systematically increase revenue and profitability, a lot of hands on labor is still required. As we begin to report more and more on our findings in our analytics study, you will see this as a theme.

Sure you can get some cool reports by installing analytics software and looking at the simple default reports. But the real juice comes when you think about what it is you need to measure and analyze to drive your business to greater heights. Used as a weapon, you can do far more than what Dennis refers to as “report surfing”. You can learn what makes your site tick, and what parts of your marketing strategy provide the greatest return. This leads to increased revenue and ROI.

In the interview with Dennis, we talk about these things. He also talks about click fraud, a phenomena which he believes is greatly over-hyped. He figures that it’s about 2% or so. Dennis points out that if you spend $8000 per month on PPC, and you have 2% click fraud, that it’s not worth that much of your time to chase down.

Of course, we all need to make sure that the PPC search engines do a good job of policing this issue. This is their solemn duty, or else our trust in those relationships will break down.